Saturday, February 07, 2009

At the beginning of this week, there were four candidates for president of El Salvador to be elected on March 15. Now there are only two:

The National Conciliation Party [PCN] announced it was leaving the race for lack of funds and expelled its candidate for refusing to abide by the decision. The candidate for another small conservative party, the Christian Democrats, dropped out of the race earlier this week.

Since dropping out, neither party has taken sides in the race, although many Salvadorans believe a deal was struck with Arena for their departure. “I have no doubt that this is because of some request from Arena,” said Roberto Rubio, a political analyst and director of the National Foundation for Development.

There was no doubt that a deal had been cut in the mind of Ernesto Rivas, who called the PCN, the "most prostituted" party in the history of the country. Regardless of the underlying reasons, the departure of the PCN and Christian Democrats from the races, leaves only Mauricio Funes of the FMLN and Rodrigo Avila of ARENA to contend in the elections five weeks away. No longer is there the prospect of the minor parties taking enough votes to force a second round of voting if Funes or Avila did not achieve an absolute majority on March 15.

7 comments:

According to my calculations based on adding the CD, FMLN, and FDR vote and splitting the PDC votes in favorable areas to each respective party I deduct that the Funes/Avila race will go like this:Funes 50.2Avila 49.8

cnn is a very pretigious or at least popular tv station and if avila refuses to debate with funes it will say a lot about how undemocratic, cowardly and gay avila really is. i think that the dropping out of the pcn and pdc for the presidential elections is pure arena strategy, they figure and they obviously pressured these parties to withdraw, that their votes are reserves, in case of a emergency like these elections, they'll need those extra votes, so they want to reclaim them cause they think, the supporters of pcn and pdc will give their votes to arena since their original parties are no longer solvent. very clever, this and winning the capital as well as the pcn holding the 'key to the 'gridlock' in the national assembly...hummm. we still haven't seen the best of arena just yet, wait for the check mate to come even sooner still.

It is way better to finish this whole thing at once in one first round of elections.

too much uncertainty and too lengthy a campaign, it is not only making our people and resources strained, stressed and overworked on this nasty political campaign.

If our political system allows for these alliances to be made, regardless of the internal methodology within the parties, well it is lawful and undisputably legal.

Nevertheless, those two parties, PDC and PCN will experience internal strife and schisms even in the way to the presidential elections after giving their support to ARENA or not.

One other thing that stands out is that the fmln has got only two extremely small parties to make any alliance with, while ARENA has two parties that command in between them, something close to 400thousand votes.

The fmln, being a FRENTE, has already gathered the leftist organiations of relevance in it. Therefore, should not complain that the right is able to come to alliances, being as it is, split in one big party (ARENA) and two medium parties (in our statistical reality).

The last thing that stands out is that funes is actually courting small town elected majors from parties of the right. This is a clear sign of how scared is Funes of the possibility of a loss at the polls. It also is a sign of how Funes' arrogance and megalomania, is teaching him some measure of humility, since it is obvious he does not have the obama efect that his ready made polls led him to believe.

And this measure of humility is good for all of us, because funes was giving too many signs of not being a tolerant man.

Even if he wins, he will have an extremely limited mandate, and that is good, because a larger mandate would propell him into a megalomaniacal rush to power.

this has just got to get more interesting as time develops. now it's just avila vs funes...no mediocre clowns in the middle. i think these developments, since the jan 18 elections, have changed the momentum a lot...it has brought funes and his followers a reality check...and now anything can really happen, but, thinking ahead, we see the damage that arena has done to the pdc and pcn, by deslegitimizing them and thus directly contributing to bi-polarize the country even further. everybody knows that after the elections, independently of who wins...no body will dare take the pcn and pdc seriously anymore, even the few supporters they have, they'll see that there just isn't a third way party in el salvador...that it's either arena or the fmln, and that's that. it may even be a good thing, or not. who knows...but we'll find out in the next decade.

When crooks are at the helm of the institutions of a country, bending and dictating the rules to suit their miopic selfish interest, anything short of murder remain within the borders of "legality". Even the giveaway of public funds for private gains, which has been the classic definition for what public corruption is.

Fact is that PCN from the very beginning offered its votes to the highest bidder, like the prostitute that they are (with no intention to offend those resourceful women that ride the times as best as they can given the circumstances that pile against them), so the ex-candidates from PCN, Chevez, have no right in whining. They knew full well the intentions of PCN was simply gaining leverage one way or the other, not running in the elections with the clear intention of victory. They wittingly became pawns, and now that they outlived their use they have no other choice than shut up and shove it.

As for the current panorama for the elections, the tensions will greatly increase now that there are only two parties, so much so that we could probably cut a through this tension with a knife. FMLN has it very difficult because the mass media ignores FMLN to the convinience of ARENA, the media's owners,so there is no one out there to make the hard questions, like: where did the funds for Quijano's 3-month circus came from? From where came the funds for Avila's "housing" projects, for his "employment fairs" (which are run by countless of organizations that he deserves to take no credit for any claim of trailblazing in the way of incentives)? Now the population has to be more vigilant that ever, we all know how ARENA can get away with fraud and fearmongering in the elections, due to my first statement above: they make the rules. They control the TSE, Fiscalia, etc., every single entity within the gov that is supposed to give transperency to the doings of gov., so we cannot stop scrutinizing every single happening that happens from hereon the elections. Even so, I am sure that ARENA's palliative bread and butter campaigns (where they give mass giveaways to silence momentarily the stomachs of the people, blinding them of the fact that ARENA's 20 years of governance has failed in satisfying their needs) will be in full-throttle. That is how they win the "hearts" of the masses, the minds... we might as well do without.

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This is Tim's El Salvador Blog, a place for looking at what's going on in El Salvador. Participate in the discussion by adding your comments. This site began November 17, 2004. For older articles be sure and check the archives.